Cities must harness technology to cope with population rises

As urban populations rise, cities need to harness technology in order to deal with the greater strain on existing infrastructure, according to speakers at IBM's sustainability summit, Start.

Over the next twenty years the number of people who live in cities across the world will increase from 2.8bn to a massive 5bn. This will cause great strain on existing infrastructure and resources, and present new challenges for planning new urban developments.

Less than 1% of the earth’s surface area is accounted for by cities, yet urban areas account for 75% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“More than anything else, the future of humankind depends on making our cities more sustainable,” said Economist and Futurologist Hamish McRae at the “Smarter Cities” day of IBM’s Start event. The event aimed to bring together thought leaders in business, government and academia to overcome challenges and explore opportunities to lead business towards a sustainable future.

Cities were described as “systems of systems” which need a multi-pronged, holistic approach to become more sustainable. There are different systems for electricity, waste management, traffic control, water, healthcare, crime fighting and transportation.

“When one of them breaks down it has a significant impact on the rest of the city,” said Simon Humberstone, Lead Executive, Local Government, IBM UK. “You can’t look at them in silos, you need to look at how they interconnect.”

Technology is key to enabling these systems to work together. Smarter cities, in IBM’s view, are “instrumented, interconnected and intelligent”. Fraser Davidson, VP Local Government, IBM explained to Wired: “Although a lot of the technology is available, in many cases it is not being implemented.”

There are some examples In Singapore, data from passenger smart cards (like London’s Oyster) is being used to make public transport more useful. By analysing the data, they were able to build a “bus arrival predictor” which tells you the precise time of your bus an hour in advance. You can also check if there is a seat on the bus before you think about running to the bus stop.

Another example is the “water-stressed city” of Sacramento in California, where they have added sensors along the 3,000 miles of its sewage system to allow better prediction of when the system will need maintenance as opposed to waiting for a pipe to burst before it gets fixed.

A further idea is having sensors and local management systems in buildings to ensure that heat and light aren’t wasted, as demonstrated in the New York Times Building in, you guessed it, New York. So if there is plenty of natural light, the electric lights automatically dim or switch off completely.

These sorts of innovations require “instrumentation” through devices such as RFIDs, sensors and surveillance technology. Rashik Parmar, CTO, North East Europe, IBM, told Wired: “All that movement of information enables to get real insight into what the city is about. Unless you have real information about the city, you don’t know what to manage.”

All of this information can then be integrated and analysed to be able to make fact-based decisions about improvements and efficiencies that can be made.

Parmar said: “It’s about how people use the technology and how technology changes people’s lives. We are right at the start of a huge journey in technology making people’s lives much better.”